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This year, I’m starting to do the weekly random 5 posts on sundays. Why? First of all, because I have more time to compile the list during the weekend and, second of all, because it syncs with last.fm‘s weekly cut-off. This week I list three very interesting and very different albums from 2011, and two classics.

Prefuse 73 – One Word Extinguisher (2003). One of those mandatory albums from Prefuse 73 (along with Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives), “One Word Extinguisher” is one of those “instrumental hip-hop meets idm” efforts. The songs are short and constantly morphing and even if you’re not much into the hip-hop field (as I am not) it should prove an interesting listen.

Grouper – A I A : Dream Loss (2011). Grouper continues where she left us after Dragging a Dead Dear up a Hill with the A I A dual release (Dream Loss and Alien Observer). The two albums are similar in taste. I tend to prefer Dream Loss because of the heavier use of distortions. Expect dark ambient, lo-fi, drone mixed with dreamy soundscapes.

M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (2011). One of my personal favorites from 2011, this is building up as my favorite M83 album as well (surpassing Saturdays = Youth). It’s dream pop at its best, with a taste of ambient and shoegaze. It even has a contribution from Zola Jesus on the “Intro” track, whose voice I find fitting perfectly in the mood M83 usually sets up for his songs.

Hecq – Avenger (2011). Panzer dubstep is the best description I can get for this album (taken from a rating at rym). The mood on Hecq’s albums has always been dark. This time he brings that to the dubstep field, with some huge basslines and a contribution from Matta. A great listen with the headphones on.

Mouse on Mars – Autoditacker (1997). I’m a huge fan of Mouse on Mars. They mix jungle, glitch, idm and ambient with a funky vibe. “Autoditacker” is a perfect example of that, and it features “Tux & Damask”, the first song I ever listened from them.

TPB has put up a press release regarding SOPA that summarizes this whole battle against piracy. I didn’t know the story about Edison’s patents, but it seems to be true. It’s hard not to like TPB’s attitude when dealing with this.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition. We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.

Albert Einstein, on Principles of Research, for Max Planck’s sixtieth birthday.

Today I discovered the work of scientist/photographer/inventor/entrepreneur/explorer Harold Edgerton. The Edgerton Digital Collections project has a lot of resources I highly recommend.

So, it’s a new year. People usually relate this to new self starts. I don’t usually do this kind of stuff, but decided on making some new year’s resolutions and make them public so that I get increased commitment on them. For a start, I want to start writing more often in here. I doubt that people actually read this, but even as I might not (always) have interesting things to say, I find that writing helps me on getting some “open loops” out of my head. I’m actually unable to keep a personal diary or things of the sort, so this blog/journal thingy might just be adequate for that. I would also like to get back and also accomplish some 30 Day Challenges. I tried to start one past November but failed miserably due to the either being busy or just plain lazy. A fresh year is just the right time to commit to that. After a few years of using it in various ways, I would also like to start contributing to open source. I feel that it’s just the right thing to do: giving back to the community. It’s a great opportunity to learn and I’m curious on the practices of open source projects. There are some projects whose output I use almost daily, so they’ll be natural choices to get involved with. I also want to get back to digital photography. I haven’t been much active with my camera (as the activity on my flickr profile shows) and I would like to improve both my photography and digital photo manipulation skills. I’m looking forward to staying close to @mattmight‘s 12 resolutions for programmers, specially on learning a new programming language and actually completing some personal projects (these usually tend to be started but never finished). Last but not least, I would also like to learn a new language, either German or French (which I have some very basic knowledge of).

Over the last month and a half, I’ve been doing some back-end signal processing stuff in Dance Don’t Fall (check the promotional video here), a project that allows you to monitor your risk of falling while actively reducing it through fun and exercise. We submitted the app to the Mobile Apps Showdown, happening at CES 2012 and are now among the 25 semifinalist. Although being there is already pretty cool, the top 8 apps will be chosen to make an appearance on stage at the event. As such, if you feel like voting in our app, now is the time!

After kim jong-il looking at things, here’s kim jong-il dropping the bass. Internet never ceases to amaze me.

I’ve been meaning to write a post after this year’s Codebits, and I’m finally putting this up. The event, although sometimes building up excessively on the “geek stereotype”, is amazing, specially if we take into account that there is no entrance fee. Kudos to SAPO and the whole organization team for that.

This year, I was contacted by @fabrantes a week before the event. He had an embryonic idea for a game that somehow mixed frenetic battles, fluid dynamics and voxatron-like graphics. We ended up building up a team that consisted of @fabrantes, @pmcteixeira, @regadas and me. There were somehow implicit responsibilities already assigned so when we got to the place we just spent a few minutes aligning our ideas for the project. It consisted of a multi and single-player game that would run in the browser. It would be supported in WebGL in the front-end and Node.js in the back-end. Each player would control a cube in a squared arena and the goal would be to push the other players’ cubes out of it. In order to do so, you would be able to send a shock wave that would create a ripple effect in the floor and, as a consequence, apply certain forces to the cubes that were affected by it. By the end of the first day, we also had @grillher joining us on creating the scenery walls that would move alongside the music.

I got responsible for the AI of the bots. I thought of a simple strategy that would involve each bot moving to a calm place in the board and shooting in the direction of the closest player. I thought I would need something to calculate the shortest path given the different intensities on the board, so I ended up implementing a sort of customized Dijkstra’s algorithm that resembled an A*, and a priority queue in JavaScript as a consequence of that. I reduced the problem of finding a calm spot in the arena to a variant of the maximum contiguous subset sum problem in a matrix. I didn’t have the time in the contest to tweak some of the calculations but my main conclusion was that there simply isn’t enough CPU time to do all this work.

The other guys were doing an amazing job. The shock wave behaviour was very interesting, the visuals were eye-candy and it was already possible to set up a connection to the main server that was orchestrating the whole game. By the end of the 48 hours competition, we managed to have a working prototype, a damn fine-looking one, and ended up grabbing the 5th place of the public vote, which has pretty awesome!

Long story short, this year’s Codebits was great. I didn’t do much besides working on the project (still saw the presentation karaoke and the quiz show, though), but left the venue with my technical curiosity spiked and a great will to work on Codename: Arena.

We actually ended up revisiting the project on muchBeta‘s hackafone, and are planning to continue working on it on a regular basis. Game AI poses some interesting challenges, and I will be doing some research on the subject for the next days (and hopefully blogging about it).

Every now and then on the IDM mailing list, someone comes up with the question of what the music genre truly is. Kent Williams highlighted the importance of the internet on the appearance and dissemination of the genre. He has a point on saying that IDM wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the mailing list:

What is interesting to me, and why I’m somewhat interested in the academic study of IDM — other than the fact that I’ve participated in the phenomenon since very close to the founding of the mailing list — is that Techno and House and Hip Hop arose, contemporaneously, before the Internet, and IDM happened after.

It wouldn’t exist except for the Internet. It wouldn’t exist except for this mailing list. IDM was ground zero for the international closed-loop feedback between artists and listeners. Before the Internet, you had to read magazines and hang around in record stores, and the music you were exposed to was effectively mediated in many ways. IDM is the first musical genre that happened as the direct result of people using the Internet in new ways to spread information.

Following Matt Cutts’ talk on trying something new for 30 days, I’m defining new monthly goals for myself, in order to actually get to do some of the stuff that has been on my personal backlog for far too long.

So, starting on November this year, I’m planning to learn how to play Go for the next 30 days. I don’t aim to become an expert on the game, but to be moderately competitive on a 19×19 board. So far, I’ve read a few chapters of “Go! More Than Just a Game”, and played (lost) some games online against a friend. Although the rules are simple, some situations are still not very clear to me. For example, it still takes me a while to recognize that there are no more profitable moves, and thus the game has ended. I was recommended to play with qGo until I was more comfortable playing with a human, and that’s what I’ll be doing the next days. I shall try to post regularly about the challenge.